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You’ve heard it before.
“The future of wealth management is holistic.”
We nod along on panels. We add it to strategy decks. Firms tell clients they can “do it all.”
But how many of us are actually building toward it — with experiences that make clients feel seen across investments, taxes, healthcare & LTC, banking, estate, and giving?
The industry data says the pressure to integrate is real — and growing.
- Technology’s first key trend is the “battle for the desktop”: best-of-breed point tools vs. all-in-one wealth platforms.
- Advisors rank CRM and account aggregation & planning as the most valuable tech strategies — the very pipes that make holistic work possible.
A Lesson from Shopify
A few years ago Shopify rolled out the Shop app. It started as a utility — pull order confirmations from your email and show everything you’ve bought in one place, with real-time tracking. Then it did something subtle but profound: it unified your whole post-purchase life, even outside Shopify merchants.
It didn’t just make checkout easier; it made the after part obvious, transparent, and habit-forming.
That’s the mindset shift we need in wealth: stop optimizing isolated touchpoints; build the connective tissue that makes the client’s whole financial life visible and manageable — even where we don’t directly bill.
Where “Holistic” Shows Up in the Data (and Why It Matters)
Banking belongs inside advice.
Half of wirehouse advisors offer banking services; only 7% of independents do. That’s a glaring integration gap — and an opportunity to win everyday relevance (cash, credit, lending) inside the advisory relationship.
Healthcare & long-term care planning isn’t optional.
Over half of 65-year-old adults will need long-term care, and more than a quarter will need it for over two years — planning and insurance coordination must live inside the wealth experience, not on the sidelines.
Related: Individual sales now account for 21% of health insurance sales, up from 10% in 2005 — a reminder that clients are already navigating more personal coverage choices.
Estate planning is a national blind spot.
Less than one-third of consumers have estate plans — a huge delta between client need and delivered experience.
Giving is surging and should be productized inside advice.
Donor-advised fund contributions reached $59.4B, up from $6.9B in 2009. Clients want structured, tax-aware generosity; we should orchestrate it.
The tooling landscape demands a platform posture.
There are 538 wealth management technology & outsourcing firms, up from 505 in 2020 — fragmentation that amplifies the need to integrate client-facing workflows.
Inside that stack, Redtail leads CRM usage, and eMoney / MoneyGuide lead planning usage — helpful anchors as you pick your “connective tissue.”
Translating the Shopify Playbook Into Practice
1) Aggregate first, monetize later
Start by giving clients a single pane of glass across what you manage and what you don’t: held-away accounts, banking, insurance, estate docs, giving (Shop started with tracking; everything else followed).
2) Build the “after” experience
Automate nudges that fire after life events: equity comp vests → tax/charitable prompts; new mortgage → cash flow & insurance review; business distribution → entity & estate review (Shop’s magic lived after checkout).
3) Productize the holistic layers
- Banking inside advice (cash, HYSA, lines, cards).
- LTC/health navigation as a standard planning module.
- Estate “always-on” status (beneficiaries, titling, POAs) with renewal reminders.
- Giving rails (DAF workflows) tied to tax-aware funding and impact reporting.
4) Win the desktop
Choose CRM + planning + aggregation as your “core” and integrate other modules around them — exactly where advisors say the value is.
5) Measure what matters
Track “% of client financial life visible,” “% of clients with active estate plan,” “% with banking connected,” and “% with LTC plan.” These are the holistic equivalents of Shopify’s engagement metrics.
The Call
Shopify didn’t fix fragmented commerce by guarding its lane. It built a connective layer that made everything clearer about the end user — and only then layered in discovery, payments, and incentives.
We can do the same.
Start building like we are — aggregating the whole picture, orchestrating across domains, and giving clients the clarity they already expect.
I get to do this every day. Its a blast.